First Impressions: House of Leaves by Zampano (Mark Z. Danielewski)

This book is intimidating. The End.

Sidetracked: Kira

When it comes to sidetracked articles they tend to be the farthest thing from books possible, and this time is no exception. Tonight I am discussing my personal views and desires as they pertain to religion. Tonight I make a personal wish to correct a wrong in this world that has not been addressed since the beginning. I wish there was a god.

My name alone WitchyErotica should suggest that I am a witch by trade. This would be a good assumption, but not quite true. Technically I am an atheist you has a strong faith in the supernatural. I used claim a belief in a god that that I didn't know or understand, but this changed recently when I was lead down a path of understanding morality from TheAmazingAtheist. After a night of deep contemplation I concluded without a doubt there was no god, and I could prove it on a moral level. This troubled me for I had repeatable observations of the supernatural. (No I still have not formulated a repeatable experiment.)

Though I am now an atheist I still practice a raw form of magic. Actually it was my observations of the paranormal and what appeared to be an innate uncontrollable reflexive gift to shape reality that made me practice witchcraft in the first place. I was born to a predominate Christian culture, but I knew I just didn’t fit into that. For me to have fit in I would have to deny what I saw and who I was, but I still have a healthy interest in this religion despite this. I took to witchcraft and magic as a way to systematical learn to control myself and understand what I saw. Though I am quite humble, I do not bow before any mortal or god. I walk my own path alone if I have to but shoulder to shoulder if possible.

I turned my back on the belief in a Goddess because I looked around, and I saw a leaderless people. Our race is shattered, broken, and unguided. When it comes down to it a god is nothing more than an unparallel leader. Gods set the moral standard in which a population follows. Being a leader is more than just making up some rules however, it is being able to uphold them and enforce them that makes you a leader. I see no grand enforcer. I see no results of a uniform enforcement anywhere. Karma is an elusive ghost in this world. Therefore there is no god. This world, no universe has always been and will always be. It was not created, but always existed. For those who are worried about an afterlife I leave this topic open. Perhaps there is an undiscovered form of energy that powers consciousness. By chance there may be an interaction with another dimension that our senses cannot easily perceive unaided. Read Flatland: A Romance of Dimensions to expand your willingness to accept we cannot see everything around us.

As a reader I am fascinated by the world created by the authors of Black Library Publishing (Blog). As a lover of TV shows that make you think Death Note is my show of choice. I bring these two things up because they both have mere mortals that rise up to become gods among men (I apologize for the sexist cliché).  As troubled as this world is, as desperate as things have become, and as hopeless as our people are, we can still turn things around and reshape things to make them better. The trouble is we are stuck following leaders that are idiots. They just lack the genius to pull us altogether in a single direction that would set things right. We need someone with a plan, that not only rights the wrongs of the world, but carries us to our rightful place among the stars. That’s why I look up to the stars in the night sky. It is more than their beauty, but it is the fact that they are ours for the take if we only had a god leading us.

The Face of a God.

I always felt like it took more than intelligence to make a good God. It takes a ruthlessness to bestow determination to our people. We are a savage animistic bunch in our hearts. It is going to take someone that understands this enough to be able to manipulate this feature to drive us to a worthy goal. Kira from Death Note had all these qualities in abundance. If I pray for anything I pray for Kira. With Kira as a moral compass we can navigate ourselves to prosperity that will inevitably lead to us conquering our own nature but the universe around us as well.

First Impression: Blackout by Connie Willis

I snatched this nifty little book off the new fiction shelf and wish I had more time to read it, but for now I have to surrender it. Blackout appears to be a work of World War 2 fiction. This book is a little bit on the beefy side, topping off at about 500 pages.

The cover shows some propeller based bombers delivering their deadly cargo to the ground below. Also there appears to be another black and white photo down below of a domed building. In between there is a flat black background with a neat black high gloss Spirograph thing happening. The title is fairly downplayed and simple which is a good sign.

Upon further inspection this appears to be a book on time travel. Apparently about 50 years from now we somewhat perfect time travel and start sending historians back to the past to collect data. Normally history would be fixed, but apparently on this trip back to the times of World War 2 the machine starts to glitch and the historians are now able to interact with the past to some extent. Probably not a good thing since they appear to be stuck in London during the Blitz.

I started to read some random page and was immediately sucked into this story. I had no idea what was going on, but from what I could tell there was a writer struggling to make a deadline for an article (feels like what I am trying to do right now). Apparently this writer is mixed in with a group of tank busters where everyone is either sick or off base and it has come down to the writer and his friend to go blow up some tanks. The whole page was dedicated to him trying to talk his way out of blowing up tanks so he can write up a story about a tea party. Wow, I am sorry, but if it came down to blowing up tanks and writing up another review for the site. . . Shit is blowing up! This exchange had me just chuckling the whole time. This feels like it's going to be a really good read that I am looking forward to.

First Impressions: Tales of Heresy

 This was my introduction into a series of books about the Horus Heresy. This is THE event that sent the universe of Warhammer 40,000 down it's dark path. It's a collection of tales set during the time when humanity should have been regaining its former glory and dominance of the galaxy. Unfortunately, the most beloved son has gone dark side and is preparing to take down humanity's greatest protected The Emperor.  

On the cover we have this dude, I don’t know, that looks badass. The lettering is in gold leaf print that gives it a regal feel. The background just looks like chaos and destruction. The back cover has some spiky looking space marines whooping ass.

I choose this book to be my introduction to the Horus Heresy on purpose. I thought a lot of small tales of what's happening all over the place would be just the thing to get me feeling the impact of this event. This was a time of legends and reading about a lot of them at once seemed right. I was not disappointed!

Personal Grievance - A.D.D. from books made into movies

Why is it that I can never get motivated to read the book after seeing the movie based on the book? I mean I know the books are supposed to be way better than the movie, yet every time I go to sit down and read the freaking book I just get so bored and anxious. I wonder if other people get this way too?

My latest encounter with this is the book The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. This has been adapted into two movies both with the title The Haunting. The later of which I have seen and rather enjoyed. I finally got my hands on a copy of the book knowing it is much different than the version I have seen, yet I just can't seem to settle down and read it. Every time I have attempted to the movie flashes in my mind, and I just get antsy and put the book down.

Now I have read other books turned to movies. The Lost World for example is a book I read intentionally to experience the book to movie conversion. I know the book is way better than the movie yet I can watch the movie but can't read the book anymore.

Hell I love Shirley Jackson. I mean this woman can do no wrong. Well ever since I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle she could do no wrong. So why can't I read one of the greatest haunted house stories every written?

Cultural Corner - Spoilers

For whatever reason the chatter about spoilers  has increased significantly, so I figured I'd throw my two cents into matters. For the people that just joined us here on planet earth, a spoiler is the term used to indicate a bit of information about a story or event that reveals some major detail before a person has had a chance to experience said event or story.  For example this is a spoiler:

This clip was taken from a movie called "The Happening", and it tells you exactly what is going on before you have any chance of figuring it out yourself. Normally spoilers are found outside of the movie, book, game, or event you are about to watch or read. With the internet spoilers are widely available to any who seek them, and somewhat hard to avoid for those that are trying to stay pure.

So I pose the simple question of do spoilers affect your reading experience as much as they do say watching a movie? My answer is a simple no. I just do not think that spoilers are as devastating to books as they are movies. In fact I think spoilers are actually helpful in terms of books rather than being devastating.

If you make a point you got to back it up so I'll start making my case by identifying the differences between the two mediums. Movies are usually not a serious investment in time compared to books. Also movies tend focus more on the events taking place than the characters that the event revolve around.

When it comes down to it a movie may take you about 90 to 120 minutes to watch while a novel can take upwards of a month to finish.  If a movie sucks and has a terrible ending it can feel like you’ve wasted your evening, but when a book sucks it feels like you have just wasted your life. Well not really, but you get the idea. Having a few spoilers for a book can save you from this terrible experience.

Since books are usually written around the characters and not the events having a few events spoiled doesn’t necessarily ruin your experience. In one of my favorite books (I won't mention the title) a little girl dies at the end. Now It was shocking to finally read about her demise, but there was enough foreshadowing and common sense to pretty much assume she wasn't going to make it. So with each passing scene she was in I was just filled with the dread of knowing she was going to die. Now had I known she was going to die even before I read the book, I would've felt every one of those moments until the end. Even the shock of her death would still felt dramatic too me. The reason for this is that the story isn't written around the event like it would've in the movie, but it was written around the process leading to the event. Her purpose was make you experience her suffering and the suffering of her family as they struggled to stay alive. In movies you really just don’t get the time to connect with the characters on a level like this, so knowing she was going to die would've sucked all meaning out of her character.

So sure maybe hearing "Straight Snape kills gay Dumbledore" might have invoked some nerd rage while standing in line waiting to get my hands on the next Harry Potter book, but did it ruin the story for me? Not really. I was still more interested in the world and people than that one plot twist.

After Thoughts: The Immortality Factor by Ben Bova

The Immortality Factor by Ben Bova is a freaking AWESOME book. The book revolves around conflicts of all kinds. Every scene is a battleground and ever word of dialog is a heat seeking missile. The enemies are numerous, and the boss battles are epic.

This is a book about scientific fiction. This is about a brother's quest to change the world and save humanity from the ravages of time and disease. Along his way he faces many obstacles such as the morality police in the form of Christian conservatives, huge multinational corporations trying to profit from his expertise, his very own brother who looks at him like a pain in the ass know it all, and the worse most vile enemy of any scientist, ignorant people. These aren't his only enemies,  oh no there are plenty to go around, but will his talent and willingness be enough to persevere against a world turned against him. I guess you will just have to read it and find out for yourself.

You know I have heard a lot of people struggle with calling this a science fiction book. To those people I say, "are you nuts?" Seriously the events of this book never happened, and the plot revolves around modern day science. Fiction plus science equals science fiction. It's getting on my nerves that people feel like if a book doesn’t have magic wielding psychic space elves in it, that it is not science fiction. When did sci-fi get such a bad rap? More and more I keep seeing things distance themselves from the sci-fi genera. The SYFY channel for example is now hosting wrestling on the network to get away from its roots. Sure they can say this move was just to protect and build the brand, but no having WWE on your channel is betrayal! What's next SYFY. . . Dr. Phil?

Alright the main character is a man named Dr. Arthur Marshak. He and his younger brother start tinkering around with Arthur's idea to manipulate stem cells to regenerate damaged spinal tissue. I should mention that Arthur gets the idea during a night of hot passionate sex with a stranger he picked up from a benefit honoring Jesse. This is a character after my own heart. After getting some initial success Arthur runs with the idea with the notion of "why stop here" and attempts to regenerate other forms of tissue as well. Eventually word gets out that Arthur is playing God and that summons all the creepy crawlers out of the woodwork to stop him.

These aren't the only problems Arthur is facing. His personal life is a mess. His brother is with the woman he nearly married. The academic world shuns him for the crime of thinking its fair to benefit from the discoveries he has made. His mother is sick and the happy little family his made at work is having trouble.

As with all stories this one lives and dies with it's characters. Arthur comes off to a lot of people like the worst kind of know it all, the know you know is going to get the job done with a major success. By contrast his bother Jesse is supposed to come off as the champion of the people, the noble humanitarian. Really he is just a happy go lucky guy that gets things neatly handed to him and completely lacks his own initiative.

Julia is the catalyst. She ended up married to Jesse after falling in love with Arthur and nearly marrying the guy. In a lot of ways she is exactly like Arthur. She is smart, motivated, and highly successful. She can see the big picture where others cannot.  So its no surprise that Arthur found her complementing to himself in every way, and that she takes to making something out of Jesse like Arthur did. Let that sink in for a moment. Arthur was having sex with the female version of himself. I am pretty sure that is as close to masturbation as it gets. Jesse is banging the female version of his brother. Ew.

Smaller roles are filled by Cassie Ianetta and Patricia Hayward. Cassie is a fellow scientist working under Arthur on another project. It is her bleeding heart that becomes the lynch pin for the moral conflict this book is centered around. Patricia is a writer the company hires to do the public relations for Arthur's lab. She becomes the love interest that allows us to see different facets of Arthur's personality.

The story itself is told from many different points of view. The book is nice in that it tells you who you are following at the beginning of each chapter. Also the story is mostly told in flashback during the hearing to determine the validity of Arthur's work.

Overall the book keeps things interesting by raising very relevant moral dilemmas that plague our time. Is the idea of cloning ethical. Should science be steered with a moral compass or allowed to roam freely where every the evidence and facts take it. Is humanity ready to outlive its natural lifespan.  Where does religion and spirituality fit into all of this. Does health care really favor the rich and elite. The only way to find out is to gather the evidence and take the trip by reading the book.

Sidetracked: Throwback Soda

As soon as I heard of the throwback sodas (pops for you Midwesterners and coke for you people that are just wrong) I was thrilled. It was not because of the nostalgia or novelty factor, but because this would be the first time I would feel at ease drinking soda in such a long time.

A long time ago I learned the hideous secret behind corn syrup. That is a secret for another time, but it's enough to say that I try to abandoned all corn syrup sweeten products. Soda is one of these products that I avoided like the plague and spoke out against.

So I went looking high and low for these new throwback Pepsi products and still came up empty no matter where I went. I tried gas stations, supermarkets, Walmarts, and vending machines all over the place. I even took my search across state lines, and still I turned up nothing. Then finally this last weekend I stumbled onto a few at a discount store.

Now I am a fan of all those people who go out and try new foods and drinks. Right now my two favorite vloggers have series running about this sorta thing (LordKat.com and CinemaSnob.com)  They are really great and you should go and check them out if you don't already. Heck I had a camera I would do this kinda thing as well.

Now onto the taste of Throwback. Throwback Mountain Dew tasted sour as hell! I should clarify the situation. I was just chewing some of that Trident sugar free gum, the orange kind, just before I cracked the seal and took a swig. There had to be some sort of weird reaction between the sugar and artificial sweetener on my tongue cuz I just couldn’t taste the sugar in the soda. I guess it makes sense considering the sweetener starts off as a sugar base. So about four French fries later the palette was cleansed and I could taste the sugar again. Even then however I could notice a difference. I remembered normal MDtasting a little heavier than this. I heard that this actually tastes more sugary, but that is just obvious.

So tonight I tried the Pepsi Throwback and well it tastes kinda like Diet Pepsi. Once again this probably goes back to that sugar sweetener base. After a few more sips it occurred to me that this wasn't quite like diet Pepsi but something else. It freaking reminds me of Crystal Pepsi!!!! Yes it’s back at least in flavor. As you can already tell I was a huge fan of the stuff and drank ENTIRELY too much when I was kid. I miss it, but you know with the throwback Pepsi it gives me hope that maybe just maybe it can make a comeback as well one day.

After Thoughts: The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children -- and Its Aftermath Review

Check out my first impressions here.

First I want to start with a word about something I found after reading this book. When I was searching for video of the writer to add to this article, I ran into a LOT of criticism toward the book. At first I thought well that’s to be expected and I was warned that it was out there, but then I started to read some of it. It really felt like people were bashing this book without having even given it a chance. They heard about it somewhere ran to Amazon.com, read a few reviews listed there, added to the negative reviews, and ran off to troll anywhere else they could find mention of this book. I fully expect that sort of thing to happen here. May I ask that if you must flame this book here, please do not just flame it because you have only read the title and nothing else. I am specific about this because this is a marketing title. It is slightly misleading, and Susan Clancy has stated that she doesn’t care much for the title herself. If you read it flame a way, debate is good, necessary, and healthy. If you haven't read it, try and keep the critiques based on personal experience and fact.

So what is this all about. The Trauma Myth is about bringing awareness to people that in most cases sexual abuse to children isn't always immediately severely damaging to children as it happens. The damage from the abuse tends to manifest itself later in the victims life as they come to understand what was done to them. When most of us think of child abuse we see children being forced into painful sexual acts by terrible horror people we would never allow in our lives. Even with a more progressive awareness of the facts that most abuse starts with people that you know and trust we still do not necessarily believe that those people exist in our lives and spheres of influence, and even if they did you would know and react. Ask yourself a serious question and really think about it, would you turn in your brother, wife, or stepfather if someone came to you and told you what they did to a child? Would you even think to suspect them in the slightest?

In the opening and heavily throughout the book Doctor Clancy makes heavy use of victims' and experts' testimony to paint the mental pictures of what is the truth in the readers mind. Expect to hear a lot of no nonsense accounts of experiences and feelings straight from people who were victimized as children. For some this will be quite an emotional ordeal. I found myself stopping several times to process what I just read from a victim. My own feelings and experiences kept bubbling to the surface as I turned page after page.

Doctor Clancy will use accurate and specifically psychological terminology. This may be a book you might want to keep a dictionary handy, but she does do a good job offsetting the difficulty. After given the actual clinical term for something she will immediately go back and clarify what she just said using simpler clearer language. I did find that this habit of immediately explaining things over again did seem to bog the pace down no matter how vital it was for a general audience's understanding of the material.

As a personal note, a lot of the material Doctor Clancy covered in the book seemed like things that I had always suspected and always thought made the most sense. Children being mostly abused by people they trust makes sense. That there is a political movement behind a lot of the understand people have and the information they are exposed to. Stuff like a lot of the educational programs geared toward children are completely ineffective as far as preventing the abuse.

A child might be able to identify an adult's actions as wrong or weird, but to be able to conceive that these acts will lead to depression, anxiety, mistrust, and/or shame years and years later as an adult is a little much. Furthermore a lot of the situations are contextually complex, since a child lacks the life experiences to help draw out the subtle details of the situation how could we expect a child to make the same decision that an adult would make in that same situation. Children always do the best they can with what they have.

There were quite of few things that I got out of this book that shocked me. First that sometimes a child can feel pleasure from the abuse. This makes sense if you think about it. That it is more common than I expected that children not only allow the abuse to happen but go along with it. I was a child raised with a lot of fight in me for some reason, and I had no trouble standing up to most people (most people pretty much included every adult in my life) that I didn’t fear so I expected other children to have had as much fight as I did.

Something else that stuck me was the way that a lot of relationships between child and abuser seem parallel adult sexual relationships. Acts of abuse tend to happen with a child and a person they trust. Same with normal sexual relations with adults. That the child may want to make the person they care about happy. Most marriages tend to work this way with someone wanting to make the person they love happy. Children who are abused sometimes want the attention that they receive from the abuser. I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that I too tend to crave the attention of the person I am dating. It just bothers me that even those these things can be quite similar (the first being totally wrong and the second being desirable) people treat victims so terribly. (I WANT TO MAKE THIS CLEAR THE CHILD ABUSERS ARE SCUM THE CHILDREN ARE NOT.)

I highly recommend reading this if only to experience the humanity that stems from the stories of the victims. I understand that some people just cannot tolerate the views expressed within but give this a chance anyways.  You will not find bravery like what comes from these victims speaking up like this often. For that I say this is a good enough read, but beyond that this book makes you think and in these we all could be better off with a little more thought in our lives.